I was reminded of Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy's infamous sound byte (used as the title of this article) when I read about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's foot-in-mouth moment during a recent CNBC interview (YouTube Link). Here's what Schmidt said: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

There is one basic problem about keeping privacy while surfing the internet...

The internet does NOT reside in the US only. It is distributed EVERYWHERE.

With that being said, I put a server in Russia/China and start grabbing data from Google searches etc etc and cache it on my own infrastructure. How do laws from the U.S. affect those servers? They simply DON'T!

So going back to the comment that Schmidt said, I quote "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place", then this obviously does make sense at least from my point of view.

Don't get me wrong, I am against the Patriot Act, or at least the implementation of it, but once the information is on the internet is it almost near to impossible to go back and repair/erase.

Please any of you that are so careful, get Maltego or one of those applications and search for yourself, phone number, SSN, etc. You'll be surprised how much data you can find.